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Harper’s Library of Living Thought 
























































. 

































THREE PLAYS 

OF 

SHAKESPEARE 


BY 


ALGERNON CHARLES 
SWINBURNE 



NEW YORK AND LONDON 
HARPER 6- BROTHERS 

1909 





Copyright, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1909, by 
Harper & Brothers. 


All rights reserved. 
Published March, 1909. 


1 LIBRARY of CONGRESS 


Two Copies Received 

APR 1 MS 


Oopyrigm Entry 

CL. AAC, No, 

h-^.547 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Publishers’ Preface ix 

King Lear 3 

Othello 27 

King Richard II 59 



PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 


TJARPER’S Library of Living 
* * Thought is intended as a re- 
sponse to what appears to be the 
special demand of the century now 
opening. Just as in the organic world 
every organism is, we are told, a 
growth of cells springing from the 
parent cell, so every good book is 
nothing more than a synthetic ex- 
pansion of a single, central, living 
thought. Bacon’s entire system of 
philosophy is nothing more than 
a development of one great thought: 
“We conquer nature by obeying 
her.” Again, before Darwin and Wal- 
lace simultaneously announced a new 


IX 


PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 


cosmogony of growth, the living 
thought at the heart of that great 
revolutionary system was expressed in 
a footnote to an article in the “ West- 
minster Review” by Herbert Spencer. 
That brief footnote was of more im- 
portance to the world than most of 
the books published in that year. The 
twentieth century is and must needs 
be in a hurry, and what it asks for is 
the central living thought of every 
intellectual movement without delay. 
Its energies are so enormously active 
that new living thoughts are jost- 
ling each other daily. The conse- 
quence is that when a writer feels 
that he has a new living thought to 
express, he does not wait to develop it 
fully — he does not pause to write a 
book, as he would have done in times 
past — he sends the suggestive article 


PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 


to one of the great reviews or maga- 
zines. Before getting into permanent 
form, this suggestive article has to wait 
until the creator of the thought has 
the opportunity of developing it, of ex- 
panding it into a book, or else until he 
republishes it in a collection of miscel- 
laneous essays upon all kinds of other 
subjects. This is why it is no un- 
common thing to see in the careful 
student’s library single numbers of a 
review, or magazine, preserved; while 
in libraries of other careful students 
we see a single article cut out of a 
review and made by the binder into a 
queer-looking little volume. Now, it 
is our purpose to furnish such students 
as these with the living central thought 
in permanent book form as soon as 
it is bom, and at a low price. The 
student will find that for the same 


XI 


PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 


price which he would give for the re- 
view containing the one desired article j 
he can obtain a beautifully printed 
little volume, well bound, and an orna- 
ment to his library. 

Having explained the raison d'etre 
of the series, we have now only a word 
or two to say upon the eminent 
writers whom we have invited to 
further our views — Mr. Algernon 
Charles Swinburne, Count Leo Tol- 
stoy, and Professor William Flinders 
Petrie. As regards the first of these : 
writers and the subject upon which 
he has chosen to write, it will be con- 
ceded that there is no literary ques- 
tion in which the twentieth century is 
more deeply concerning itself than 
that of Shakespeare and his art. And 
it will be conceded that the foremost 
living poet of the world, who is also 
xii 


PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 

acknowledged to be the greatest Shake- 
spearean student, is, above all men, 
adequately equipped for treating such 
a subject. The “Three Plays of 
Shakespeare” upon which he dis- 
courses are “King Lear,” “Othello,” 
and “King Richard II.” In the first 
he has given us a new living thought 
indeed — the thought that King Lear 
is an expression of the most advanced 
doctrine as to the absolute equality of 
man confronted by nature, and of the 
futility of the monarchical idea, which 
was never more rampant than in the 
age in which Shakespeare lived. In 
the second, in comparing and contrast- 
ing Shakespeare’s treatment of the 
jealousy of Othello with the treatment 
of the same passion in the novel upon 
which it is based — the seventh story 
of the third decade of the Hecatom- 
xiii 


PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 


mithi of M. Giovanbattista Giraldi 
Cinthio — he has been equally bold. 
He has shown that, while the great 
dramatist has undoubtedly trans- 
figured the story to the most pathetic 
of tragedies, he has in one case — that 
of Iago’s stealing of the handkerchief — 
missed the most pathetic feature of the 
“tragic mischief.” In “King Richard 
II” he for the first time shows the 
struggle in the mind of Shakespeare 
between the influence of Marlowe and 
the influence of Robert Greene. A 
more interesting analysis of Shake- 
speare’s dramatic, as well as metrical, 
art has never been given to the world. 

By comparing Mr. Swinburne’s vol- 
ume with that of Professor Petrie, it 
will be observed that it does not reach 
the average length of the books in 
this series. But we feel sure that the 


PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 


reader will think it of no less value 
and of no less importance on account 
of its brevity. 

With regard to Count Tolstoy’s 
contribution, at this moment a great 
and passionate attention is being given 
to religious questions. “New theolo- 
gies” are springing up like mushrooms. 
The character of the teachings of Christ 
is being discussed with an absolute free- 
dom such as was not possible in pre- 
vious times. There is no more com- 
manding figure in the realm of religious 
thought to-day than Count Tolstoy. 
He impresses the modern imagination 
with the majesty of a prophet. By 
the suffrages of the Christian w~orld he 
would be the one above all others 
chosen to tell once more the old, old 
story. He has done this with the 
eloquence of grand simplicity in “The 


XV 


PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 


Teaching of Jesus.” It is based, as 
he tells us in his preface, on talks to 
the children of the village near his 
home. All “who become as little 
children” before the great mysteries 
must feel its power. 

Professor William Flinders Petrie, 
the eminent Egyptologist and philos- 
opher, contributes a remarkable vol- 
ume on “Personal Religion in Egypt 
before Christianity.” It is an exami- 
nation of the “old bottles into which 
the new wine was poured” that he 
gives the reader with all the resources 
of his unrivalled knowledge of that im- 
portant epoch. 

These volumes are the precursors of 
volumes of a like vital character. 

A volume entitled “ Poetic Ade- 
quacy in the Twentieth Century” will 
be contributed by Mr. Theodore Watts- 


XVI 


PUBLISHERS' PREFACE 


Dunton, who stands in the foremost 
line of great English critics by right of 
subtle and profound insight, which 
is his, perhaps, because he is himself 
a creator. 

Science will naturally claim special 
attention in the Library of Living 
Thought. Among the early volumes 
in this department Professor Svante 
Arrhenius, the distinguished Swedish 
savant, has written a deeply interest- 
ing account of the conceptions which 
man has formed from the earliest to the 
latest times of the origin and formation 
of the universe. No more important 
contribution to the expounding of the 
problem of the universe has been made 
than his own previous work, “Worlds 
in the Making. ” 

February, igog. 

xvii 


































✓ 


t 


KING LEAR 










I 









































































. 

















KING LEAR 


IF nothing were left of Shakespeare 
* but the single tragedy of King 
Lear , it would still be as plain as it 
is now that he was the greatest man 
that ever lived. As a poet, the author 
of this play can only be compared 
with ^Eschylus: the Hebrew proph- 
ets and the creator of Job are some- 
times as sublime in imagination and 
in passion, but always quite incom- 
parably inferior in imaginative in- 
telligence. Sophocles is as noble, as 
beautiful, and as kindly a thinker 
and a writer: but the gentle Shake- 
speare could see farther and higher 
and wider and deeper at a glance 
than ever could the gentle Sophocles. 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


Aristophanes had as magnificent a 
power of infinitely joyous wit and 
infinitely inexhaustible humour: but 
whom can he show us or offer us to be 
set against Falstaff or the Fool ? It is 
true that Shakespeare has neither the 
lyric nor the prophetic power of the 
Greeks and the Hebrews: but then 
it must be observed and remembered 
that he, and he alone among poets and 
among men, could well afford to dis- 
pense even with such transcendent gifts 
as these. Freedom of thought and 
sublimity of utterance came hand in 
hand together into English speech : 
our first great poet, if loftiness and 
splendour of spirit and of word be 
taken as the test of greatness, was 
Christopher Marlowe. From his dead 
hand the one man bom to excel him, 
and to pay a due and a deathless 
4 


KING LEAR 


tribute to his deathless memory, took 
up the heritage of dauntless thought, 
of daring imagination, and of since 
unequalled song. 

The tragedy of King Lear , like the 
trilogy of the Oresteia, is a thing 
incomparable and unique. To com- 
pare it with Othello is as inevitable 
a temptation as to compare the Aga- 
memnon with the Prometheus of the 
one man comparable with Shakespeare. 
And the result, for any reader of 
human intelligence and decent humil- 
ity in sight of what is highest in 
the spiritual world, must always be a 
sense of adoring doubt and exulting 
hesitation. In Othello and in Prome- 
theus a single figure, an everlasting 
and godlike type of heroic and human 
agony, dominates and dwarfs all others 
but those of the traitor Iago and the 
5 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


tyrant God. There is no Clytami- 
nestra in the one, and there is no 
Cordelia in the other. “ The gentle 
lady married to the Moor” is too 
gentle for comparison with the most 
glorious type of womanhood which 
even Shakespeare ever created before 
he conceived and brought forth Imo- 
gen. No one could have offered to 
Cordelia the tribute of so equivocal a 
compliment as was provoked by the 
submissive endurance of Desdemona — 
“Truly, an obedient lady.” Antigone 
herself — and with Antigone alone can 
we imagine the meeting of Cordelia 
in the heaven of heavens — is not so 
divinely human as Cordelia. We love 
her all the more, with a love that at 
once tempers and heightens our wor- 
ship, for the rough and abrupt repeti- 
tion of her nobly unmerciful reply 


KING LEAR 


to her father’s fond and fatuous appeal. 
Almost cruel and assuredly severe in 
its uncompromising self-respect, this 
brief and natural word of indignantly 
reticent response is the key-note of all 
that follows — the spark which kindles 
into eternal life the most tragic of all 
tragedies in the world. All the yet 
unimaginable horror of the future 
becomes at once inevitable and assured 
when she shows herself so young and 
so untender — so young and true. And 
what is the hereditary horror of doom 
once imminent over the house of 
Atreus to this instant imminence of 
no supernatural but a more awfully 
natural fate ? Cursed and cast out, she 
leaves him and knows that she leaves 
him in the hands of Goneril and Regan. 

Coleridge, the greatest though not 
the first great critic and apostle or 
7 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


interpreter of Shakespeare, has noted 
‘‘these daughters and these sisters” 
as the only characters in Shakespeare 
whose wickedness is ultranatural — 
something outside and beyond the 
presumable limits of human evil. It 
would be well for human nature if it 
were so; but is it? They are “re- 
morseless, treacherous, lecherous, kind- 
less”; hot and hard, cold and cun- 
ning, savage and subtle as a beast of 
the field or the wilderness or the 
jungle. But such dangerous and 
vicious animals are not more excep- 
tional than the very noblest and 
purest of their kind. An lago is 
abnormal: his wonderful intelligence, 
omnipotent and infallible within its 
limit and its range, gives to the un- 
clean and maleficent beast that he 
is the dignity and the mystery of a 
8 


KING LEAR 


devil. Goneril and Regan would be 
almost vulgarly commonplace by com- 
parison with him if the conditions of 
their life and the circumstances of 
their story were not so much more 
extraordinary than their instincts and 
their acts. “Regan,” according to 
Coleridge, “is not, in fact, a greater 
monster than Goneril, but she has 
the power of casting more venom.” 
A champion who should wish to enter 
the lists on behalf of Goneril might 
plead that Regan was so much more 
of a Gadarean sow than her elder 
sister as to be, for all we know, inca- 
pable of such passion as flames out in 
Goneril at the thought of foreign 
banners spread in a noiseless land. 

“Where’s thy drum? 

France spreads his banners in our noiseless 
land ; 


9 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


With plumed helm thy slayer begins [his] 
threats ; 

Whiles thou, a moral fool, sit’st still, and 
criest 

‘Alack, why does he so?’” 

Beast and she-devil as she is, she 
rises in that instant to the level of 
an unclean and a criminal Joan of 
Arc. Her advocate might also in- 
voke as an extenuating circumstance 
the fact that she poisoned Regan. 

Francois-Victor Hugo, the author 
of the best and fullest commentary 
ever written on the text of which he 
gave us the most wonderful and 
masterly of all imaginable transla- 
tions, has perhaps unwittingly en- 
forced and amplified the remark of 
Coleridge on the difference between 
the criminality of the one man chosen 
by chance and predestined by nature 

IO 


KING LEAR 


as the proper paramour of either 
sister and the monstrosity of the 
creatures who felt towards him as 
women feel towards the men they 
love. Edmund is not a more true- 
born child of hell than a true-born 
son of his father. Goneril and Regan 
are legitimate daughters of the pit; 
the man who excites in them such 
emotion as in such as they are may 
pass as the substitute for love is but 
a half-blooded fellow from the infer- 
nal as well as the human point of 
view. His last wish is to undo the 
last and most monstrous of his crimes . 1 
Such a wish would have been im- 
possible to either of the sisters by 
whom he can boast with his dying 
breath that Edmund was beloved. 

“ I pant for life: some good I mean to do, 
Despite of mine own nature. Quickly send, 

1 See note on page 24. 


11 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


Be brief in it, to the castle; for my writ 
Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia; 
Nay, send in time.” 

The incomparable genius of the 
greatest among all poets and all men 
approved itself incomparable for ever 
by the possibly unconscious instinct 
which in this supreme work induced 
or compelled him to set side by side 
the very lowest and the very highest 
types of imaginable humanity. Kent 
and Oswald, Regan and Cordelia, stand 
out in such relief against each other 
that Shakespeare alone could have 
wrought their several figures into one 
perfect scheme of spiritual harmony. 
Setting aside for a moment the reflec- 
tion that outside the work of ^Eschylus 
there is no such poetry in the world, 
we must remember that there is no 
such realism. And there is no discord 


12 


KING LEAR 


between the supreme sublimities of 
impassioned poetry and the humblest 
realities of photographic prose. In- 
credible and impossible as it seems, 
the impression of the one is enhanced 
and intensified by the impression of 
the other. 

That Shakespeare’s judgment was 
as great and almost as wonderful as 
his genius has been a commonplace of 
criticism ever since the days of Cole- 
ridge; questionable only by such dirty 
and dwarfish creatures of simian in- 
tellect and facetious idiocy as mistake 
it for a sign of wit instead of dullness, 
and of distinction instead of degrada- 
tion, to deny the sun in heaven and 
affirm the fragrance of a sewer. But 
I do not know whether his equally 
unequalled skill in the selection and 
composition of material for the con- 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


struction of a masterpiece has or has 
not been as all but universally recog- 
nized. No more happy and no more 
terrible inspiration ever glorified the 
genius of a poet than was that which 
bade the greatest of them all inweave 
or fuse together the legend of Lear 
and his daughters with the story 
of Gloucester and his sons. It is 
possible that an episode in Sidney’s 
Arcadia may have suggested, as is 
usually supposed or usually repeated, 
the notion or conception of this more 
than tragic underplot ; but the stu- 
dent will be disappointed who thinks 
to find in the sweet and sunbright 
work of Sidney’s pure and happy 
genius a touch or a hint of such 
tragic horror as could only be con- 
ceived and made endurable by the 
deeper as well as higher, and darker 


14 


KING LEAR 


as well as brighter, genius of Shake- 
speare. And this fearful understudy 
in terror is a necessary, an indispen- 
sable, part of the most wonderful 
creation ever imagined and realized 
by man. The author of the Book of 
Job, the author of the Eumenides, 
can show nothing to be set beside the 
third act of King Lear. All that is 
best and all that is worst in man 
might have been brought together 
and flashed together upon the mind’s 
eye of the spectator or the student 
without the intervention of such ser- 
vile ministers as take part with Goneril 
and Regan against their father. Storm 
and lightning, thunder and rain, be- 
come to us, even as they became to 
Lear, no less conscious and respon- 
sible partners in the superhuman in- 
humanity of an unimaginable crime. 
15 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


The close of the Prometheus itself 
seems less spiritually and overpower- 
ingly fearful by comparison with a 
scene which is not the close and is less 
terrible than the close of King Lear. 
And it is tio whit more terrible than 
it is beautiful. The splendour of 
the lightning and the menace of the 
thunder serve only or mainly to re- 
lieve or to enhance the effect of 
suffering and the potency of passion 
on the spirit and the conscience of a 
man. The sufferer is transfigured: 
but he is not transformed. Mad or 
sane, living and dying, he is passionate 
and vehement, single-hearted and self- 
willed. And therefore it is that the 
fierce appeal, the fiery protest against 
the social iniquities and the legal 
atrocities of civilized mankind, which 
none before the greatest of all English- 


KING LEAR 


men had ever dreamed of daring to 
utter in song or set forth upon the 
stage, comes not from Hamlet, but 
from Lear. The young man whose 
infinite capacity of thought and whose 
delicate scrupulosity of conscience at 
once half disabled and half deified 
him could never have seen what was 
revealed by suffering to an old man 
who had never thought or felt more 
deeply or more keenly than an average 
labourer or an average king. Lear’s 
madness, at all events, was assuredly 
not his enemy, but his friend. 

The rule of Elizabeth and her suc- 
cessor may have been more arbitrary 
than we can now understand how the 
commonwealth of England could ac- 
cept and could endure ; but how 
far it was from a monarchy, from a 
government really deserving of that 
17 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


odious and ignominious name, we may 
judge by the fact that this play could 
be acted and published. Among all 
its other great qualities, among all the 
many other attributes which mark it 
for ever as matchless among the works 
of man, it has this above all, that it is 
the first great utterance of a cry from 
the heights and the depths of the 
human spirit on behalf of the outcasts 
of the world — on behalf of the social 
sufferer, clean or unclean, innocent or 
criminal, thrall or free. To satisfy 
the sense of righteousness, the craving 
for justice, as unknown and unimagin- 
able by Dante as by Chaucer, a change 
must come upon the social scheme 
of things which shall make an end of 
the actual relations between the judge 
and the cutpurse, the beadle and the 
prostitute, the beggar and the king. 


KING LEAR 


All this could be uttered, could be 
prophesied, could be thundered from 
the English stage at the dawn of the 
seventeenth century. Were it within 
the power of omnipotence to create a 
German or a Russian Shakespeare, 
could anything of the sort be whispered 
or muttered or hinted or suggested 
from the boards of a Russian or a 
German theatre at the dawn of the 
twentieth ? When a Tolstoi or a 
Sudermann can do this, and can do 
it with impunity in success, it will be 
allowed that his country is not more 
than three centuries behind England 
in civilization and freedom. Not po- 
litical reform, but social revolution as 
beneficent and as bloodless, as abso- 
lute and as radical, as enkindled the 
aspiration and the faith of Victor 
Hugo, is the key-note of the creed 
19 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


and the watchword of the gospel 
according to Shakespeare. Not, of 
course, that it was not his first and 
last aim to follow the impulse which 
urged him to do good work for its 
own sake and for love of his own art: 
but this he could not do without 
delivery of the word that was in him 
— the word of witness against wrong 
done by oversight as well as by cruelty, 
by negligence as surely as by crime. 
These things were hidden from the 
marvellous wisdom of Hamlet, and 
revealed to the more marvellous in- 
sanity of Lear. 

There is nothing of the miraculous 
in this marvel: the mere presence 
and companionship of the Fool should 
suffice to account for it ; Cordelia 
herself is but a little more adorably 
worthy of our love than the poor 


20 


KING LEAR 


fellow who began to pine away after 
her going into France and before 
his coming into sight of reader or 
spectator. Here again the utmost 
humiliation imaginable of social state 
and daily life serves only to exalt and 
to emphasize the nobility and the 
manhood of the natural man. The 
whip itself cannot degrade him; the 
threat of it cannot change his attitude 
towards Lear; the dread of it cannot 
modify his defiance of Goneril. Being, 
if not half-witted, not altogether as 
other men are, he urges Lear to return 
and ask his daughters’ blessing rather 
than brave the midnight and the 
storm: but he cleaves to his master 
with the divine instinct of fidelity 
and love which is not, though it 
should be, as generally recognized 
in the actual nature of a cat as in 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


the proverbial nature of a dog. And 
when the old man is trembling on the 
very verge of madness, he sees and 
understands the priceless worth of 
such devotion and the godlike wisdom 
of such folly. In the most fearfully 
pathetic of all poems the most divinely 
pathetic touch of all is the tender 
thought of the houseless king for the 
suffering of such a fellow-sufferer as 
his fool. The whirlwind of terror and 
pity in which we are living as we read 
may at first confuse and obscure to 
the sight of a boyish reader the 
supreme significance and the unutter- 
able charm of it. But if any elder does 
not feel it too keenly and too deeply 
for tears, it is a pity that he should 
waste his time and misuse his under- 
standing in the study of Shakespeare. 

There is nothing in all poetry so 


KING LEAR 


awful, so nearly unendurable by the 
reader who is compelled by a natural 
instinct of imagination to realize and 
believe it, as the close of the Choephorce, 
except only the close of King Lear. 
The cry of Ugolino to the earth that 
would not open to swallow and to 
save is not quite so fearful in its 
pathos. But the skill which made 
use of the stupid old chronicle or 
tradition to produce this final master- 
piece of tragedy is coequal with the 
genius which created it. The legen- 
dary Cordelia hanged herself in prison, 
long after her father’s death, when 
defeated in battle by the sons of 
Goneril. And this most put id and 
contemptible tradition suggested to 
Shakespeare the most dramatic and the 
most poetic of all scenes and all 
events that ever bade all men not 


23 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


devoid of understanding understand 
how much higher is the genius of man 
than the action of chance: how far 
the truth of imagination exceeds and 
transcends at all points the accident 
of fact. That an event may have 
happened means nothing and matters 
nothing; that a man such as ^Eschylus 
or Shakespeare imagined it means 
this: that it endures and bears wit- 
ness what man may be, at the highest 
of his powers and the noblest of his 
nature, for ever. 

1 A small but absurd and injurious misprint in this 
passage (see page n) has hitherto escaped attention. 
From Butter’s edition downward the word Cordelia 
has been allowed to stand, where it should have been 
obvic is that the sign of the genitive case was re- 
quired and had been dropped out by accident. Of 
course we should read, 

.... my writ 
Is on the life of Lear, and on Cordelia’s. 

The present reading, “my writ is — on Cordelia,” 
is pure and patent nonsense. 


OTHELLO 


. 



•• • 

















































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■ 





OTHELLO 


TN the seventh story of the third 
* decade of the Hecatommithi of M. 
Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio, “ nobile 
Ferrarese,” first published in 1565, 
there is an incident so beautifully 
imagined and so beautifully related 
that it seems at first inexplicable how 
Shakespeare, when engaged in trans- 
figuring this story into the tragedy of 
Othello, can have struck it out of his 
version. The loss of the magic hand- 
kerchief which seals the doom of the 
hero and his fellow victim is far less 
plausibly and far less beautifully ex- 
plained by a mere accident, and a 
most unlikely accident, than by a 
device which heightens at once the 

27 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


charm of Desdemona and the atrocity 
of Iago. It is through her tenderness 
for his little child that he takes oc- 
casion to destroy her. 

The ancient or ensign, who is name- 
less as every other actor in the story 
except the Moor’s wife , 1 is of course, 
if compared with Iago, a mere shadow 
cast before it by the advent of that 
awful figure. But none the less is 
he the remarkably powerful and origi- 
nal creature of a true and tragic 

1 From her name of Disdemona, a curious cor- 
ruption of the Greek word dvadat/uov, Cinthio, with 
a curious anticipation of one of the finest and 
most delightful touches in one of the finest and 
most delightful characters ever created by the 
very genius of creative humour, deduces the 
Shandean moral that her father was the first 
person blameworthy for having given her a name 
of unhappy augury. “And it was resolved among 
the company, that the name being the first gift 
that the father gives his son, he ought to bestow 
on him one both magnificent and fortunate, as 
though he wished thus to presage for him good 
and greatness.” 


28 


OTHELLO 


genius. Every man may make for 
himself, and must allow that he can- 
not pretend to impose upon any other, 
his own image of the most wicked man 
ever created by the will of man or 
God. But Cinthio’s villain is dis- 
tinctly and vividly set before us: a 
man “ of most beautiful presence, 
but of the wickedest nature that ever 
was man in the world.” Less ab- 
normal and less inhumanly intellectual 
than Iago, who loved Desdemona 
“not out of absolute lust” (perhaps 
the strangest and subtlest point of all 
that go to make up his all but inscru- 
table character), this simpler villain, 
“no whit heeding the faith given to 
his wife, nor friendship, nor faith, 
nor obligation, that he might have 
to the Moor, fell most ardently in 
love with Disdemona. And he set 


29 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


all his thought to see if it might 
become possible for him to enjoy 
her.” 

This plain and natural motive would 
probably have sufficed for any of 
those great contemporaries who found 
it easier to excel all other tragic or 
comic poets since the passing of 
Sophocles and Aristophanes than to 
equal or draw near to Shakespeare. 
For him it was insufficient. Neither 
envy nor hatred nor jealousy nor 
resentment, all at work together in 
festering fusion of conscious and con- 
templative evil, can quite explain 
Iago even to himself; yet neither 
Macbeth nor even Hamlet is by nature 
more inevitably introspective. But 
the secret of the abyss of this man’s 
nature lies deeper than did ever plum- 
met sound save Shakespeare’s. The 
30 


OTHELLO 


bright and restless devil of Goethe’s 
invention, the moumfuller and more 
majestic devil created by Marlowe, 
are spirits of less deep damnation 
than that incarnate in the bluff plain- 
spoken soldier whose honesty is the 
one obvious thing about him, the one 
unmistakable quality which neither 
man nor woman ever fails to recog- 
nize and to trust. 

And what is even the loftier Faust, 
whose one fitting mate was Helen, if 
compared with the subjects of Iago’s 
fathomless and bottomless malice ? 
This quarry cries on havoc louder 
than when Hamlet fell. Shakespeare 
alone could have afforded to cancel 
the most graceful touch, to efface the 
loveliest feature, in the sketch of 
Cinthio’s heroine. But Desdemona 
can dispense with even this. 

3 * 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


“The Moor’s wife went often, as I 
have said, to the ancient’s wife’s 
house, and abode with her a good 
part of the day. Whence this man 
seeing that she sometimes bore about 
her a handkerchief which he knew 
that the Moor had given her, the 
which handkerchief was wrought in 
Moorish wise most subtly, and was 
most dear to the lady, and in like 
wise to the Moor, he bethought him 
to take it from her secretly, and 
thence to prepare against her her 
final ruin. And he having a girl of 
three years old, which child was much 
beloved of Disdemona, one day that 
the hapless lady had gone to stay at 
the house of this villain, he took the 
little girl in his arms and gave her to 
the lady, who took her and gathered 
her to her breast : this deceiver, 
32 


OTHELLO 


who was excellent at sleight of hand, 
reft from her girdlestead the handker- 
chief so cunningly that she was no 
whit aware of it, and departed from 
her right joyful. Disdemona, know- 
ing not this, went home, and being 
busied with other thoughts took no 
heed of the handkerchief. But some 
days thence, seeking for it and not 
finding it, she was right fearful lest 
the Moor should ask it of her, as he 
was often wont to do.” 

No reader of this terribly beautiful 
passage can fail to ask himself why 
Shakespeare forbore to make use of it. 
The substituted incident is as much 
less probable as it is less tragic. The 
wife offers to bind the husband’s 
aching forehead with this especially 
hallowed handkerchief: “he puts it 
from him, and it drops,” unnoticed by 


33 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


either, for Emilia to pick up and 
reflect, '‘I am glad I have found this 
napkin.” 

What can be the explanation of 
what a dunce who knows better than 
Shakespeare might call an oversight? 
There is but one: but it is all-suffi- 
cient. In Shakespeare’s world as in 
nature’s it is impossible that monsters 
should propagate: that Iago should 
beget, or that Goner il or Regan should 
bring forth. Their children are creat- 
ures unimaginable by man. The old 
chronicles give sons to Goneril, who 
vanquish Cordelia in battle and drive 
her to suicide in prison: but Shake- 
speare knew that such a tradition 
was not less morally and physiologi- 
cally incongruous than it was poeti- 
cally and dramatically impossible. And 
Lear’s daughters are not monsters 

34 


OTHELLO 


in the proper sense: their unnatural 
nature is but the sublimation and 
exaggeration of common evil qualities, 
unalloyed, untempered, unqualified by 
any ordinary admixture of anything 
not ravenously, resolutely, mercilessly 
selfish. They are devils only by dint 
of being more utterly and exclusively 
animals — and animals of a lower and 
hatefuller type — than usual. But any 
one less thoroughly intoxicated with 
the poisonous drug of lifelong power 
upon all others within reach of his 
royal hand would have been safe 
from the convincing and subjugating 
influence of Goneril and Regan. That 
is plain enough: but who will be fool 
enough to imagine that he would have 
been safe against the more deadly 
and inevitable influence of Iago? 

The most fearful evidence of his 


35 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


spiritual power — for it would have been 
easy for a more timid nature than his 
wife’s to secure herself beforehand 
against his physical violence by a 
warning given betimes to either of 
his intended victims — was necessarily 
siippressed by Shakespeare as unfit 
for dramatic service. Emilia will not 
believe Othello’s assurance of her hus- 
band’s complicity in the murder of 
Desdemona: the ancient’s wife in 
Cinthio’s terrible story “knew all, 
seeing that her husband would fain 
have made use of her as an instrument 
in the lady’s death, but she would 
never assent, and for dread of her 
husband durst not tell her anything.” 
This is not more striking and satis- 
fying in a tale than it would have 
been improper and ineffectual in a 
tragedy. So utter a prostration of 
36 


OTHELLO 


spirit, so helpless an abjection of soul 
and abdication of conscience under 
the absolute pressure of sheer terror, 
would have been too purely dreadful 
and contemptible a phase of debased 
nature for Shakespeare to exhibit 
and to elaborate as he must needs 
have done throughout the scenes in 
which Iago’s wife must needs have 
figured: even if they could have been 
as dramatic, as living, as convincing 
as those in which the light, unprin- 
cipled, untrustworthy, loving, lying, 
foolish, fearless and devoted woman 
is made actual and tangible to our 
imagination as none but Shakespeare 
could have made her: a little afraid, 
it may be, of her husband, when she 
gives him the stolen handkerchief, 
but utterly dauntless when his 
murderous hand is lifted against 
37 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


her to silence her witness to the 
truth. 

The crowning mark of difference 
between such a nature as this and 
such a nature as that of the mistress 
for whose sake she lays down her 
life too late to save her is less obvious 
even in their last difference of opinion 
— as to whether there are or are not 
women who abuse their husbands as 
Othello charges his wife with abusing 
him — than in the previous scene when 
Emilia most naturally and inevitably 
asks her if he has not just shown him- 
self to be jealous, and she answers: 

Who, he ? I think the sun where he was born 
Drew all such humours from him. 

This would be a most noble stroke 
of pathos if the speaker were wrong 
— misled by love into loving error; 

38 


OTHELLO 


but the higher Shakespearean pathos, 
unequalled and impossible for man 
to conceive as ever possibly to be 
equalled by man, consists in the fact 
that she was right. And the men of 
Shakespeare’s age could see this: they 
coupled together with equally assured 
propriety and justice of epithet 

Honest Iago and the jealous Moor. 

The jealousy of the one and the 
honesty of the other must stand or 
fall together. Othello, when over- 
mastered by the agony of the sudden 
certitude that the devotion of his 
love has been wasted on a harlot who 
has laid in ashes the honour and the 
happiness of his life, may naturally 
or rather must inevitably so bear 
himself as to seem jealous in the eyes 
of all — and they are all who know 


39 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


him — to whom Iago seems the living 
type of honesty: a bluff, gallant, 
outspoken fellow, no conjurer and 
no saint, coarse of speech and cynical 
of humour, but true and tried as steel : 
a man to be trusted beyond many a 
far cleverer and many a more refined 
companion in peril or in peace. It is 
the supreme triumph of his superb 
hypocrisy so to disguise the pride 
of intellect which is the radical in- 
stinct of his nature and the central 
mainspring of his action as to pass 
for a man of rather inferior than 
superior intelligence to the less blunt 
and simple natures of those on whom 
he plays with a touch so unerring 
at the pleasure of his merciless will. 
One only thing he cannot do : he 
cannot make Desdemona doubt of 
Othello. The first terrible outbreak 


40 


OTHELLO 


of his gathering passion in a triple 
peal of thunder fails to convince her 
that she has erred in believing him 
incapable of jealousy. She can only 
believe that he has vented upon her 
the irritation aroused by others, and 
repent that she should have charged 
him even in thought with unkind- 
ness on no more serious account than 
this. “Nay, we must think men are 
not gods”: and she had been but 
inconsiderate and over-exacting, an 
'‘unhandsome warrior” unfit to bear 
the burden and the heat of the day — 
of a lifelong union and a fellowship 
in battle and struggle against the 
trials and the tests of chance, to 
repine internally for a moment on 
such a score as that. 

Were no other proof extant and 
flagrant of the palpable truth that 
41 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


Shakespeare excelled all other men of 
all time on record as a poet in the 
most proper and literal sense — as a 
creator of man and woman, there 
would be overflowing and overwhelm- 
ing proof of it in the creation and 
interaction of these three characters. 
In the more technical and lyrical 
sense of the word, no less than in 
height of prophetic power, in depth 
of reconciling and atoning inspiration, 
he is excelled by ^Eschylus; though 
surely, on the latter score, by ^Eschy- 
lus alone. But if the unique and 
marvellous power which at the close 
of the Oresteia leaves us impressed 
with a crowning and final sense of 
high spiritual calm and austere con- 
solation in face of all the mystery of 
suffering and of sin — if this supreme 
gift of the imaginative reason was 


42 


OTHELLO 


no more shared by Shakespeare than 
by any poet or prophet or teacher 
of Hebrew origin, it was his and his 
alone to set before us the tragic 
problem of character and event, of 
all action and all passion, all evil and 
all good, all natural joy and sorrow 
and chance and change, in such full- 
ness and perfection of variety, with 
such harmony and supremacy of jus- 
tice and of truth, that no man known 
to historic record ever glorified the 
world whom it would have been so 
utterly natural and so comparatively 
rational to fall down before and wor- 
ship as a God. 

For nothing human is ever for a 
moment above the reach or beyond 
the scope or beneath the notice of his 
all but superhuman genius. In this 
very play he sets before mankind 

43 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


for ever not only the perfect models 
of heroic love and honour, of womanly 
sweetness and courage, of intelligent 
activity and joyous energy in evil, 
but also an unsurpassable type of the 
tragicomic dullard. Roderigo is not 
only Iago’s but (in Dryden’s mas- 
terly phrase) “God Almighty’s fool.” 
And Shakespeare shows the poor devil 
no more mercy than Iago or than 
God. You see at once that he was 
bom to be plundered, cudgelled, and 
killed — if he tries to play the villain 
— like a dog. No lighter comic relief 
than this rather grim and pitiless 
exhibition of the typic fool could 
have been acceptable or admissible on 
the stage cff so supreme a tragedy. 

Such humourous realism — and it is 
excellent of its kind — as half relieves 
and half intensifies the horror of 


44 


OTHELLO 


Cinthio’s tale may serve as well as 
any other point of difference to show 
with what matchless tact of trans- 
figuration by selection and rejection 
the hand of Shakespeare wrought 
his will and set his mark on the 
materials left ready for it by the hand 
of a lesser genius. The ancient way- 
lays and maims the lieutenant on a 
dark night as he comes from the house 
of a harlot “with whom he was wont 
to solace himself and when the 
news gets abroad next morning, and 
reaches the ears of Disdemona, “she, 
who was of a loving nature, and 
thought not that evil should thence 
befall her, shewed that she had right 
great sorrow for such a mishap. Here- 
of the Moor took the worst opinion 
that might be, and went to find the 
ancient, and said to him, ‘Thou 
45 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


knowest well that my ass of a wife 
is in so great trouble for the 
lieutenant’s mishap that she is like 
to run mad.’ ‘And how could you,’ 
said he, ‘deem otherwise, seeing that 
he is her soul ?’ ‘ Her soul, eh ?’ 

replied the Moor. ‘ I will pluck — that 
will I — the soul from her body.’” 

Shakespeare and his one disciple 
Webster alone could have afforded to 
leave this masterly bit of dialogue un- 
used or untranslated. For they alone 
would so have elevated and ennobled 
the figure of the protagonist as to 
make it unimaginable that he could 
have talked in this tone of his wife 
and her supposed paramour with the 
living instrument of his revenge. 
Could he have done so, he might have 
been capable of playing the part 
played by the merciless Moor who 

46 


OTHELLO 


allows the ancient to thrash her to 
death with a stocking stuffed with 
sand. No later master of realistic 
fiction can presumably have surpassed 
the simple force of impression and 
effect conveyed by this direct and 
unlovely narrative. 

“And as they debated with each 
other whether the lady should be 
done to death by poison or dagger, 
and resolved not on either the one or 
the other of these, the ancient said, 
‘A way there is come into my mind 
whereby you shall satisfy yourself, 
and there shall be no suspicion of 
it whatever. And it is this. The 
house wherein you dwell is very old, 
and the ceiling of your chamber has 
many chinks in it. I will that with a 
stocking full of sand we smite Disde- 
mona so sore that she die thereof, 


47 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


whereby there may seem on her no 
sign of blows: when she shall be dead, 
we will make part of the ceiling fall, 
and will shatter the lady’s head; 
feigning that a beam as it fell has 
shattered it and killed her : and in 
this wise there shall be no one who 
may conceive any suspicion of you, 
every man believing that her death 
has befallen by accident.’ The cruel 
counsel pleased the Moor, and after 
abiding the time that seemed con- 
venient to him, he being one night 
with her abed, and having already 
hidden the ancient in a little chamber 
that opened into the bedchamber, 
the ancient, according to the order 
taken between them, made some man- 
ner of noise in the little chamber: 
and, hearing it, the Moor said, sud- 
denly, to his wife, ‘Hast thou heard 
48 


OTHELLO 


that noise?’ ‘I have heard it,’ 
said she. ‘Get up,’ subjoined the 
Moor, ‘and see what is the matter.’ 
Up rose the hapless Disdemona, and, 
as soon as she came near the little 
chamber, forth came thereout the 
ancient, who, being a strong man, 
and of good muscle, with the stocking 
which he had ready gave her a cruel 
blow in the middle of her back, 
whereby the lady instantly fell, with- 
out being able wellnigh to draw 
breath. But with what little voice 
that she could get she called on the 
Moor to help her, and he, risen out 
of bed, said to her, ‘ Most wicked 
lady, thou hast the wage of thine 
unchastity: thus fare those women, 
who, feigning to love their husbands, 
set horns on their heads.’ The 
wretched lady, hearing this, and feel- 
49 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


in g herself come to her end, inasmuch 
as the ancient had given her another 
blow, said that in witness of her faith 
she called upon the divine justice, 
seeing that the world's failed her. 
And as she called on God to help her, 
when the third blow followed, she 
lay slain by the villainous ancient. 
Then, having laid her in bed, and 
shattered her head, he and the Moor 
made the rooftree of the chamber 
fall, as they had devised between 
them, and the Moor began to call for 
help, for the house was falling: at 
whose voice the neighbours came run- 
ning, and having uncovered the bed, 
they found the lady under the roof- 
beams dead." 

We are a long way off Shakespeare 
in this powerfully dramatic and realis- 
tic scene of butchery: it is a far cry 
50 


OTHELLO 


from Othello, a nature made up of 
love and honour, of resolute righteous- 
ness and heroic pity, to the relentless 
and deliberate ruffian whose justice 
is as brutal in its ferocity as his 
caution is cold - blooded in its fore- 
sight. The sacrificial murder of Des- 
demona is no butchery, but tragedy 
— terrible as ever tragedy may be, 
but not more terrible than beautiful; 
from the first kiss to the last stab, 
when the sacrificing priest of retribu- 
tion immolates the victim whose blood 
he had forborne to shed for pity of 
her beauty till impelled to forget his 
first impulse and shed it for pity of 
her suffering. His words can bear 
no other meaning, can imply no other 
action, that would not be burlesque 
rather than grotesque in its horror. 
And the commentators or annotators 
51 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


who cannot understand or will not 
allow that a man in almost unimagin- 
able passion of anguish may not be 
perfectly and sedately mindful of con- 
sistency and master of himself must 
explain how Desdemona manages to 
regain her breath so as to speak three 
times, and utter the most heavenly 
falsehood that ever put truth to 
shame, after being stifled to death. 
To recover breath enough to speak, 
to think, and to lie in defence of her 
slayer, can hardly be less than to 
recover breath enough to revive and 
live, if undespatched by some sharper 
and more summary method of homi- 
cide. The fitful and intermittent lack 
of stage directions which has caused 
and perpetuated this somewhat short- 
sighted oversight is not a more obvious 
evidence of the fact that Shakespeare’s 
52 


OTHELLO 


text has lost more than any other 
and lesser poet’s for want of the 
author’s revision than is the mis- 
placing of a letter which, as far as I 
know, has never yet been set right. 
When Othello hears that Iago has 
instigated Roderigo to assassinate Cas- 
sio, he exclaims, “ O villain!” and 
Cassio ejaculates, “Most heathenish, 
and most gross!” The sense is im- 
proved and the metre is rectified when 
we perceive that the original printer 
mistook the word “villanie” for the 
word “villaine.” Such corrections of 
an unrevised text may seem slight 
and trivial matters to Englishmen 
who give thanks for the like labour 
when lavished on second-rate or third- 
rate poets of classical antiquity: the 
toil bestowed by a Bentley or a Por- 
son on Euripides or Horace must natu- 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


rally, in the judgment of universities, 
seem wasted on Shakespeare or on 
Shelley. 

One of the very few poets to be 
named with these has left on ever- 
lasting record the deliberate expres- 
sion of his judgment that Othello 
combines and unites the qualities of 
King Lear , '‘the most tremendous 
effort of Shakespeare as a poet” (a 
verdict with which I may venture to 
express my full and absolute agree- 
ment), and of Hamlet , his most tre- 
mendous effort “as a philosopher or 
meditator.” It may be so: and 
Coleridge may be right in his estimate 
that 11 Othello is the union of the two.” 
I should say myself, but with no 
thought of setting my opinion against 
that of the man who at his best was 
now and then the greatest of all 

54 


OTHELLO 


poets and all critics, that the fusion 
of thought and passion, inspiration 
and meditation, was at its height in 
King Lear. But in Othello we get the 
pure poetry of natural and personal 
emotion, unqualified by the righteous 
doubt and conscientious intelligence 
which instigate and impede the will 
and the action of Hamlet. The col- 
lision and the contrast of passion and 
intellect, of noble passion and infernal 
intellect, was never before and can 
never be again presented and verified 
as in this most tragic of all tragedies 
that ever the supreme student of 
humanity bequeathed for the study 
of all time. As a poet and a thinker 
Aeschylus was the equal, if not the 
superior, of Shakespeare; as a creator, 
a revealer, and an interpreter, infinite 
in his insight and his truthfulness, 
55 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


his tenderness and his wisdom, his 
justice and his mercy, no man who 
ever lived can stand beside the author 
of Othello. 



KING RICHARD II 










KING RICHARD II 


I T is a truth more curious than 
* difficult to verify that there was 
a time when the greatest genius ever 
known among the sons of men was 
uncertain of the future and unsure 
of the task before it; when the one 
unequalled and unapproachable mas- 
ter of the one supreme art which 
implies and includes the mastery of 
the one supreme science perceptible 
and accessible by man stood hesitat- 
ing between the impulsive instinct 
for dramatic poetry, the crown and 
consummation of all philosophies, the 
living incarnation of creative and in- 
telligent godhead, and the facile seduc- 
tion of elegiac and idyllic verse, of 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


meditative and uncreative song: be- 
tween the music of Orpheus and the 
music of Tibullus. The legendary 
choice of Hercules was of less mo- 
ment than the actual choice of Shake- 
speare between the influence of Robert 
Greene and the influence of Christopher 
Marlowe. 

The point of most interest in the 
tragedy or history of King Richard II 
is the obvious evidence which it gives 
of the struggle between the worse 
and the better genius of its author. 
“ ’Tis now full tide ’tween night and 
day.” The author of Selinms and 
Andronicus is visibly contending with 
the author of Faustus and Edward II 
for the mastery of Shakespeare’s poetic 
and dramatic adolescence. Already 
the bitter hatred which was soon to 
vent itself in the raging rancour of 

60 


KING RICHARD II 


his dying utterance must have been 
kindled in the unhappy heart of 
Greene b}^ comparison of his original 
work with the few lines, or possibly 
the scene or two, in his unlovely 
though not unsuccessful tragedy of 
Titus Andronicus , which had been 
retouched or supplied by Shakespeare; 
whose marvellous power of transfigura- 
tion in the act of imitation was never 
overmatched in any early work of a 
Raffaelle while yet the disciple of a 
Perugino. There are six lines in that 
discomfortable play which can only 
have been written, if any trust may 
be put in the evidence of intelligent 
comparison, by Shakespeare; and yet 
they are undoubtedly in the style of 
Greene, who could only have written 
them if the spirit of Shakespeare had 
passed into him for five minutes or so: 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


King, be thy thoughts imperious, like thy 
name. 

Is the sun dimmed that gnats do fly in it ? 
The eagle suffers little birds to sing, 

And is not careful what they mean thereby, 
Knowing that with the shadow of his wing 
He can at pleasure stint their melody. 

There is nothing so fine as that in 
the elegiac or rhyming scenes or pas- 
sages of King Richard II. And yet it 
is not glaringly out of place among the 
sottes monstruosites — if I may borrow 
a phrase applied by Michelet .to a 
more recent literary creation — of the 
crazy and chaotic tragedy in which a 
writer of gentle and idyllic genius 
attempted to play the part which his 
friend Marlowe and their supplanter 
Shakespeare were born to originate 
and to sustain. To use yet another 
and a most admirable French phrase, 
the author of Titus Andronicus is 

62 


KING RICHARD II 


evidently a mouton enrage. The mad 
sheep who has broken the bounds of 
his pastoral sheepfold has only, in his 
own opinion, to assume the skin of a 
wolf, and the tragic stage must ac- 
knowledge him as a lion. Greene, in 
his best works of prose fiction and 
in his lyric and elegiac idyls, is as 
surely the purest and gentlest of 
writers as he was the most reckless 
and disreputable of men. And when 
ambition or hunger lured or lashed 
him into the alien field of tragic 
poetry, his first and last notion of the 
work in hand was simply to revel and 
wallow in horrors after the fashion, 
by no means of a wild boar, but 
merely of a wether gone distracted. 

Nevertheless, the influence of this 
unlucky trespasser on tragedy is too 
obvious in too much of the text of 
63 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


King Rickard II to be either ques- 
tioned or overlooked. Coleridge, whose 
ignorance of Shakespeare’s predeces- 
sors was apparently as absolute as it is 
assuredly astonishing in the friend of 
Lamb, has attempted by super-subtle 
advocacy to explain and excuse, if not 
to justify and glorify, the crudities and 
incongruities of dramatic conception 
and poetic execution which signalize 
this play as unmistakably the author’s 
first attempt at historic drama : it 
would perhaps be more exactly accu- 
rate to say, at dramatic history. But 
they are almost as evident as the 
equally wonderful and youthful genius 
of the poet. The grasp of character 
is uncertain: the exposition of event 
is inadequate. The reader or specta- 
tor unversed in the byways of his- 
tory has to guess at what has already 

64 


KING RICHARD II 


happened — how, why, when, where, 
and by whom the prince whose mur- 
der is the matter in debate at the 
opening of the play has been mur- 
dered. He gets so little help or light 
from the poet that he can only guess 
at random, with blind assumption or 
purblind hesitation, what may be 
the right or wrong of the case which 
is not even set before him. The 
scolding-match between Bolingbroke 
and Mowbray, fine in their primitive 
way as are the last two speeches of 
the latter declaimer, is liker the work 
of a pre-Marlowite than the work of 
Marlowe’s disciple. The whole scene 
is merely literary, if not purely aca- 
demic: and the seemingly casual in- 
terchange of rhyme and blank verse 
is more wayward and fitful than even 
in Romeo and Juliet. That the finest 
65 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


passage is in rhyme, and is given 
to a character about to vanish from 
the action of the play, is another sign 
of poetical and intellectual immatur- 
ity. The second scene has in it a 
breath of true passion and a touch 
of true pathos: but even if the sub- 
ject had been more duly and def- 
initely explained, it would still have 
been comparatively wanting in depth 
of natural passion and pungency of 
natural pathos. The third scene, full 
of beautifully fluent and plentifully 
inefficient writing, reveals the pro- 
tagonist of the play as so pitifully 
mean and cruel a weakling that no 
future action or suffering can lift him 
above the level which divides and 
purifies pity from contempt. And 
this, if mortal manhood may venture 
to pass judgment on immortal god- 
66 


KING RICHARD II 


head, I must say that Shakespeare 
does not seem to me to have seen. 
The theatrical trickery which masks 
and reveals the callous cruelty and 
the heartless hypocrisy of the his- 
trionic young tyrant is enough to 
remove him once for all beyond reach 
of manly sympathy or compassion 
unqualified by scorn. If we can ever 
be sorry for anything that befalls so 
vile a sample of royalty, our sorrow 
must be so diluted and adulterated 
by recollection of his wickedness and 
baseness that its tribute could hardly 
be acceptable to any but the most 
pitiable example or exception of man- 
kind. But this is not enough for 
the relentless persistence in spiritual 
vivisection that seems to guide and 
animate the poet’s manipulation and 
evolution of a character which at 
67 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


once excites a contempt and hatred 
only to be superseded by the loath- 
ing and abhorrence aroused at thought 
of the dastardly ruffian by the death- 
bed of his father’s noble and venerable 
brother. The magnificent poetry which 
glorifies the opening , scene of the 
second act, however dramatically ap- 
propriate and effective in its way, is 
yet so exuberant in lyric and elegiac 
eloquence that readers or spectators 
may conceivably have thought the 
young Shakespeare less richly en- 
dowed by nature as a dramatist than 
as a poet. It is not of the speaker 
or the hearer that we think as we 
read the most passionate panegyric 
on his country ever set to hymnal 
harmonies by the greatest of patriotic 
poets but iEschylus alone: it is simply 
of England and of Shakespeare, 

68 


KING RICHARD II 


The bitter prolongation of the play 
upon words which answers the half- 
hearted if not heartless inquiry, “ How 
is’t with aged Gaunt?” is a more dra- 
matic touch of homelier and nearer 
nature to which Coleridge has done 
no more than exact justice in his ad- 
mirable comment: “A passion there 
is that carries off its own excess 
by plays on words as naturally, and 
therefore as appropriately to drama, 
as by gesticulations, looks, or tones.” 
And the one thoroughly noble and 
nobly coherent figure in the poem 
disappears as with a thunderclap or 
the sound of a trumpet calling to 
judgment a soul too dull in its base- 
ness, too decrepit in its degradation, 
to hear or understand the summons. 

Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee ! 
These words hereafter thy tormentors be I 
69 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


But the poor mean spirit of the hearer 
is too narrow and too shallow to feel 
the torment which a nobler soul in 
its adversity would have recognized 
by the revelation of remorse. 

With the passing of John of Gaunt 
the moral grandeur of the poem passes 
finally away. Whatever of interest 
we may feel in any of the surviving 
figures is transitory, intermittent, and 
always qualified by a sense of ethical 
inconsistency and intellectual inferi- 
ority. There is not a man among 
them: unless it be the Bishop of 
Carlisle: and he does but flash across 
the action for an ineffectual instant. 
There is often something attractive 
in Aumerle; indeed, his dauntless and 
devoted affection for the king makes 
us sometimes feel as though there 
must be something not unpitiable or 

70 


KING RICHARD II 


unlovable in the kinsman who could 
inspire and retain such constancy of 
regard in a spirit so much manlier 
than his own. But the figure is too 
roughly and too thinly sketched to be 
thoroughly memorable as a man’s: and 
his father’s is an incomparable, an in- 
credible, an unintelligible and a mon- 
strous nullity. Coleridge’s attempt to 
justify the ways of York to man — to 
any man of common sense and com- 
mon sentiment — is as amusing in Cole- 
ridge as it is amazing in any other and 
therefore in any lesser commentator. 

In the scene at Windsor Castle be- 
tween the queen and her husband’s 
minions the idyllic or elegiac style 
again supplants and supersedes the 
comparatively terse and dramatic 
manner of dialogue between the noble- 
men whom we have just seen lashed 
71 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


into disgust and goaded into revolt 
by the villainy and brutality of the 
rascal king. The dialogue is beautiful 
and fanciful: it makes a very pretty 
eclogue: none other among the count- 
less writers of Elizabethan eclogues 
could have equalled it. But if we look 
for anything more or for anything 
higher than this, we must look else- 
where: and we shall not look in vain 
if we turn to the author of Edward 
the Second. When the wretched York 
creeps in, we have undoubtedly such 
a living and drivelling picture of hys- 
terical impotence on the downward 
grade to dotage and distraction as 
none but Shakespeare could have 
painted. When Bolingbroke reappears 
and Harry Percy appears on the stage 
of the poet who has bestowed on him 
a generous portion from the inexhaust- 

72 


KING RICHARD II 


ible treasure of his own immortal life, 
we find ourselves again among men, 
and are comforted and refreshed by 
the change. The miserable old re- 
gent’s histrionic attempt to play the 
king and rebuke the rebel is so admi- 
rably pitiful that his last unnatural and 
monstrous appearance in the action of 
the play might possibly be explained 
or excused on the score of dotage — an 
active and feverish fit of impassioned 
and demented dotage. 

The inspired effeminacy and the 
fanciful puerility which dunces at- 
tribute to the typical character of a 
representative poet never found such 
graceful utterance as the greatest of 
poets has given to the unmanliest of 
his creatures when Richard lands in 
Wales. Coleridge credits the poor 
wretch with “an intense love of his 


73 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


country,” intended to “redeem him 
in the hearts of the audience” in 
spite of the fact that “even in this 
love there is something feminine and 
personal.” There is nothing else in 
it: as anybody but Coleridge would 
have seen. It is exquisitely pretty 
and utterly unimaginable as the utter- 
ance of a man. The two men who 
support him on either side, the loyal 
priest and the gallant kinsman, offer 
him words of manly counsel and 
manful cheer. He answers them with 
an outbreak of such magnificent poe- 
try as might almost have been utter- 
ed by the divine and unknown and 
unimaginable poet who gave to eter- 
nity the Book of Job: but in this case 
also the futility of intelligence is as 
perfect as the sublimity of speech. 
And his utter collapse on the arrival 

74 


KING RICHARD II 


of bad tidings provokes a counter- 
change of poetry as splendid in utter- 
ance of abjection and despair as the 
preceding rhapsody in expression of 
confidence and pride. The scene is 
still rather amoebaean than dramatic: 
it is above the reach of Euripides, 
but more like the imaginable work 
of a dramatic and tragic Theocritus 
than the possible work of a Sophocles 
when content to give us nothing more 
nearly perfect and more compara- 
tively sublime than the Trachimics. 
And it is even more amusing than 
curious that the courtly censors who 
cancelled and suppressed the scene 
of Richard’s deposition should not 
have cut away the glorious passage 
in which the vanity of kingship is 
confronted, by the grovelling repent- 
ance of a king, with the grinning 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


humiliation of death. The dramatic 
passion of this second great speech is 
as unmistakable as the lyric emotion 
of the other. And the utter collapse 
of heart and spirit which follows on 
the final stroke of bad tidings at once 
completes the picture of the man, and 
concludes in equal harmony the finest 
passage of the poem and the most 
memorable scene in the play. 

The effect of the impression made 
by it is so elaborately sustained in the 
following scene as almost to make a 
young student wonder at the interest 
taken by the young Shakespeare in 
the development or evolution of such 
a womanish or semivirile character. 
The style is not exactly verbose, as we 
can hardly deny that it is in the less 
passionate parts of the second and 
third acts of King John: but it is 

76 


KING RICHARD II 


exuberant and effusive, elegiac and 
Ovidian, in a degree which might well 
have made his admirers doubt, and 
gravely doubt, whether the future 
author of Othello would ever be compe- 
tent to take and hold his place beside 
the actual author of Faustus. Mar- 
lowe did not spend a tithe of the words 
or a tithe of the pains on the presenta- 
tion of a character neither more worthy 
of contempt nor less worthy of com- 
passion. And his Edward is at least 
as living and convincing, as tragic 
and pathetic a figure as Shakespeare’s 
Richard. 

The garden scene which closes this 
memorable third act is a very pretty 
eclogue, not untouched with tragic 
rather than idyllic emotion. The 
fourth act opens upon a morally 
chaotic introduction of incongruous 
77 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


causes, inexplicable plaintiffs, and in- 
comprehensible defendants. Whether 
Aumerle or Fitzwater or Surrey or 
Bagot is right or wrong, honourable 
or villainous, no reader or spectator 
is given a chance of guessing: it is a 
mere cockpit squabble. And the scene 
of deposition which follows, full as 
it is of graceful and beautiful writing, 
need only be set against the scene of 
deposition in Edward the Second to 
show the difference between rhetori- 
cal and dramatic poetry, emotion and 
passion, eloquence and tragedy, litera- 
ture and life. The young Shake- 
speare’s scene is full to superfluity 
of fine verses and fine passages: his 
young compeer’s or master’s is from 
end to end one magnificent model of 
tragedy, " simple, sensuous, and pas- 
sionate” as Milton himself could have 
78 


KING RICHARD II 


desired: Milton, the second as Shake- 
speare was the first of the great 
English poets who were pupils and 
debtors of Christopher Marlowe. It 
is pure poetry and perfect drama: 
the fancy is finer and the action more 
lifelike than here. Only once or 
twice do we come upon such a line 
as this in the pathetic but exuberant 
garrulity of Richard: “ While that 
my wretchedness doth bait myself.” 
That is worthy of Marlowe. And 
what follows is certainly pathetic: 
though certainly there is a good deal 
of it. 

The last act might rather severely 
than unfairly be described as a series 
of six tragic or tragicomic eclogues. 
The first scene is so lovely that no 
reader worthy to enjoy it will care 
to ask whether it is or is not so lifelike 


79 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


as to convey no less of conviction 
than all readers must feel of fascina- 
tion in the continuous and faultless 
melody of utterance and tenderness 
of fancy which make it in its way an 
incomparable idyl. From the dramat- 
ic point of view it might certainly be 
objected that we know nothing of the 
wife, and that what we know of the 
husband does not by any means tend 
to explain the sudden pathos and 
sentimental sympathy of their part- 
ing speeches. The first part of the 
next scene is as beautiful and blame- 
less an example of dramatic narrative 
as even a Greek poet could have given 
at such length : but in the latter 
part of it we cannot but see and 
acknowledge again the dramatic im- 
maturity of the poet who in a very 
few years was to reveal himself as 
80 


KING RICHARD II 


beyond all question, except from the 
most abject and impudent of dunces, 
the greatest imaginable dramatist or 
creator ever bom into immortality. 
Style and metre are rough, loose, and 
weak: the dotage of York becomes 
lunacy. Sa folie en furie est tournee. 
The scene in which he clamours for 
the blood of his son is not in any 
proper sense tragic or dramatic: it 
is a very ugly eclogue, artificial in 
manner and unnatural in substance. 
No feebler or unlovelier example exists 
of those '‘jigging veins of rhyming 
mother- wits” which Marlowe’s im- 
perial rebuke should already have 
withered into silence on the lips of the 
veriest Marsyas among all the amoe- 
baean rhymesters of his voluble and 
effervescent generation. 

The better nature of the young 

81 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


Shakespeare revives in the closing 
scenes: though Exton is a rather 
insufficient ruffian for the part of so 
important an assassin. We might 
at least have seen or heard of him 
before he suddenly chips the shell 
as a full-fledged murderer. The last 
soliloquy of the king is wonderful in 
its way, and beautiful from any point 
of view: it shows once more the in- 
fluence of Marlowe’s example in the 
curious trick of selection and tran- 
scription of texts for sceptic medita- 
tion and analytic dissection. But we 
see rather more of the poet and less 
of his creature the man than Marlowe 
might have given us. The interlude 
of the groom, on the other hand, 
gives promise of something different 
in power and pathos from the poetry 
of Marlowe: but the scene of slaughter 

82 


KING RICHARD II 


which follows is not quite satisfactory: 
it is almost boyish in its impetuosity 
of buffeting and bloodshed. The last 
scene, with its final reversion to rhyme, 
may be described in Richard’s own 
previous words as good, “and yet 
not greatly good.” 

Of the three lines on which the 
greatest genius that ever made earth 
more splendid, and the name of man 
more glorious, than without the pas- 
sage of its presence they could have 
been, chose alternately or successively 
to work, the line of tragedy was that 
on which its promise or assurance of 
future supremacy was first made mani- 
fest. The earliest comedies of Shake- 
speare, overflowing with fancies and 
exuberant in beauties as they are, 
gave no sign of inimitable power: 
their joyous humour and their sun- 
83 


THREE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 


bright poetry were charming rather 
than promising qualities. The im- 
perfections of his first historic play, 
on which I trust I have not touched 
with any semblance of even the most 
unwilling or unconscious irreverence, 
are surely more serious, more obvious, 
more obtrusive, than the doubtless 
undeniable and indisputable imper- 
fections of Romeo and Juliet. If the 
style of love-making in that loveliest 
of all youthful poems is fantastically 
unlike the actual courtship of modern 
lovers, it is not unliker than is the 
style of love-making in favour with 
Dante and his fellow-poets of juvenile 
and fanciful passion. Setting aside 
this objection, the first of Shake- 
speare’s tragedies is not more beau- 
tiful than blameless. There is no 
incoherence of character, no incon- 
84 


KING RICHARD II 


sistency of action. Aumerle is hardly 
so living a figure as Tybalt: Capulet 
is as indisputably probable as York 
is obviously impossible in the part of 
a headstrong tyrant. There is little 
feminine interest in the earliest come- 
dies: there is less in the first history. 
In the first tragedy there is nothing 
else, or nothing but what is so sub- 
servient and subordinate as simply 
to bring it out and throw it into re- 
lief. In the work of a young poet 
this difference would or should be 
enough to establish and explain the 
fact that though he might be greater 
than all other men in history and 
comedy, he was still greater in tragedy. 


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